Decades after Lucille and Harold Hargrave make what peace they can over the drowning of their 8-year-old son, Jacob reappears at their doorstep, just as they remember him.
The boy’s reanimation, though unexplained, isn’t an isolated miracle but part of the global phenomenon fueling poet Jason Mott’s debut novel, The Returned.
In the weeks that follow Jacob’s arrival, a Japanese soldier killed in World War II stumbles into a rural American gas station; a French artist who died at the height of his career reunites with a (now elderly) lover who made his work known to the world.
These varied tales of the Returned appear as vignettes sprinkled throughout the larger story unfolding in and around the Hargrave household, where Harold and Lucille grapple with the impossible: Is Jacob truly the son they knew and loved, or has he been unspeakably changed after decades in the afterlife?
Ultimately, for the Hargraves, it doesn’t matter — their son is home. But for the world at large, the debate grows to epic proportions. As thousands of the Returned materialize in all corners of the world, with no discernible pattern or reason, the social order must accommodate a population that is homeless, unknown and anomalous to human nature.
The Hargraves’ sleepy hometown quickly becomes an epicenter for the political strife that erupts in the face of — what? An epidemic? An apocalypse? Something more benign and serendipitous? As tensions escalate, the novel becomes a metaphor for those moments in history when the fearful majority must confront an Other they refuse to know or understand.
The novel is ambitious and heartfelt in its investigation. As Mott reveals in his afterword, The Returned was inspired by a dream of his late mother’s visitation, and this nostalgic origin lends the novel a warm authenticity.
It’s worth reading for its exploration of the human experience: What if our greatest personal loss, our defining grief, is suddenly undone? What if death is no longer final, just another of life’s uncertain possibilities? To tackle such profound questions requires deft and thorough nuance, but The Returned doesn’t venture there often enough.
Many of the Returned characters read like phantoms, and maybe that’s the point. But the living seem to wrestle with this by asking the same broad question (what are they?), never digging deeper into the nuance of what they must witness as they live among the Returned. At least, nobody does so with memorable eloquence.
Jacob, for example, when he does speak, mostly delivers quaint jokes, something he and his father playfully shared in Jacob’s first life. While Harold is generally unnerved by the implications of his son’s return, he never seems to notice what the reader can’t ignore — that a child who speaks in quips is perhaps more ghostly than human.
More broadly, the complex emotions that ought to plague the novel’s central characters are most often delivered in broad strokes, usually stated rather than shown: “He’d decided that being angry in general was the best way to deal with whatever was going on in his heart that he didn’t understand.”
Nevertheless, far ahead of its publication, the novel has garnered a frenzy of attention. ABC plans to adapt the The Returned into a TV series, renamed Resurrection, for airing next year. That interest might speak to the novel’s intriguing question: What happens when we get what we most hunger for? Discerning readers may find the delivery, at times, noticeably flat and somewhat deflating.
Cecily Sailer is a freelance writer in Austin.
(Harlequin Mira, $24.95)